AI Isn't The Slop. People Are The Slop.

I've been ranting about this on and off on Fedi, so I figure now might be a good time to coalesce my thoughts into a real document.

Basically what I am trying to say: we are blaming AI for slop. We are blaming the wrong thing.

And it's tempting! I totally understand why people want to do it. However, I believe that by blaming the tool and not blaming the users, we overlook an important contributor to poor-quality software: people themselves.

This problem predates LLMs

Poor software quality predates LLMs by considerable time.

Windows slop

DOS itself is peak slop. The OS was derived from QDOS, an OS made in a few weeks. No memory protection. A nearly barbaric-level of simplicity.

Windows was built upon this.

Windows 9x, especially poor-quality drivers, basically ensured Windows 9x machines could scarcely be up more than a day. Many machines crashed multiple times a day. The hard limit of course was 49.7 days, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a Windows 9x machine that ran that long.

Then you had Windows XP. Windows NT actually has a very elaborate ACL model. Virtually no one uses it. Everything runs as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM in practise. This account has near God-like privileges over the computer. This is done not because Windows can't do finer-grained permissions. It's simply because it is much simpler to ship software this way, even if a security issue can lead to full-system compromise.

And then you had Windows Vista, which was a hog and barely ran on many computers of the era. If that isn't slop, I don't know what is.

And of course modern Windows has been a downhill shitshow since Windows 7.

Unix slop

Lest people think I dunk on Windows too much: anyone else remember X11 and its myriad of problems? How it would just randomly crash for no reason? Or how desktops would be inconsistent and buggy? Or laggy? Or how crappy Linux desktops were until relatively recently?

Or Hell, PulseAudio? Its random latency and lag? How ALSA wasn't properly designed to begin with, so we needed PulseAudio to begin with? And how ALSA was basically "not invented here" for OSS?

Electron slop

For the biggest offender in the slop universe, look no further than Electron.

Ironically named for a point particle that takes up no identifiable space, Electron is some of the largest software you can find on a computer. It's just glorified Chromium at that. You need to run like six copies of it just to have all the chat apps you need to talk to everyone.

And all these browsers include features the applications will never use, such as WebUSB, WebSerial, WebHID, WebGPU, and God knows what else Google has invented this week. And none of them can share any memory space.

And developers love it! Because React devs are all universities churn out these days, and that's all industry has these days. Native UI is practically dead in the commercial space. Why bother? You can just find a cheap web dev straight out of college to make your application, and pay them basically whatever you want, because there are so many.

Oh, the application uses 2–3 gigabytes of RAM? That's crazy. Anyway. Buy more RAM, peasant. Oh. Wait. You can't? That sucks, I guess.

It's easy to scapegoat AI companies

All the AI companies are Capitalism on steroids and crack cocaine combined. Their economics make zero sense. They've created what is blatantly the most grotesquely large bubble of our time.

Yet I don't believe AI companies are entirely to blame for their own hype.

I actually believe it's tech companies, and their boosters in the form of many programmers.

People are using the tools

If this was a case of "they're building this for nobody," this post wouldn't even exist. Nobody would be using tools to make slop.

But they are.

It's understandable to be mad at people for making themselves customers of such a clearly unethical industry. That said, people buy products from unethical industries constantly with few qualms constantly, so I can't help but feel there's an element of hypocrisy here, and there's an element of genuine fear of people losing their jobs (many already have).

Given the environmental cost, why would people embrace these tools?

It's simple:

1. Many people in tech aren't here because they love creation.
2. The tech industry has burned people out.

Tech is a bro factory

Tech rewards "move fast, break things" as a mentality. It's not about making something good. It's about making something that can survive until the next pivot, or until someone buys the company for parts, or whatever.

This mentality bleeds over into developers, who mostly joined the industry not for the love of creation, but for the high wages programmers earn and the belief they are temporary embarrassed founders.

These people just want to be recognised as exceptional. They don't care that the AI is doing everything for them, and likely doing it wrong. They simply want to be seen for their perceived merits.

For the ones who do love development, they have to compete with these people constantly. It becomes exhausting.

Tech is also a burnout factory

Many programmers are totally burned out. Open-source maintainers are burned out having full-time demands put on them for free. People who work in the commercial space have unreasonable demands that are getting worse and worse placed upon them.

So many developers are burned out, it's no wonder they're using LLMs.

Anecdotally, the tools are only worsening the burnout. It's trying to squeeze juice out of a dry lemon. But in modern society, you either keep working, or you don't eat.

People are the slop

At the end of the day, who issues the prompts? Who builds the AI systems?

People do.

People use Claude. People write the prompts. People use the code.

People use AI slop because it solves a problem for them, even if it solves it completely wrongly. Even if they've done nothing to really check the LLM's work.

Without prompts, without people, these LLMs do nothing. They sit idle. Even OpenClaw (as cursed as it is) requires someone to run the bot.

Hence, I've come to believe AI isn't the slop. It's the people.

AI is a symptom of a sick society. It is a symptom of a society that does not reward the act of creation, but expects others to create. It is a symptom of a world that rewards "grindset" mentality.

This will not change until culture changes

Even if genAI companies went bust tomorrow, we'd still have people writing slop. Too many people would say "at least humans are writing it."

I say no to that. Slop shouldn't be accepted regardless of the source.

We need a culture that encourages people to take pride in their work, take more rest, and help more with burnout.

We need to give people more interesting problems to solve than making the latest bullshit.ai company.

We need more unions. We need more PTO, actual PTO, not this "unlimited" PTO that you're too terrified to use.

Things have to change in society or things will not get any better.

There is no "going back to the way it was" when this bubble bursts. The bubble is so large, when it pops, it is very likely to take down many companies with it. Tech won't be recognisable anymore after this is all said and done.

And perhaps that's not a bad thing.